


1000x

by newboldtrue



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-11 01:19:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7869946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newboldtrue/pseuds/newboldtrue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Who are you, Roxas?” she asked. The ice in her drink had long since melted, but she was beyond caring. Something—perhaps it didn’t have a name, but certainly a <i>thing</i>, was changing, and Naminé felt like she was in the center of it.</p><p>He gave a breath of a laugh, running his hands through his hair again. “I was just about to ask you the same question.”</p><p>Entry for the KH Worlds Connected 2016 fanzine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1000x

Naminé let her fingers splay out over her sketchbook cover, feeling the texturing under her hands, sighing as her pastels rolled off her napkin and against her plastic cup. It was a beautiful late spring day that would have been perfect for sitting under a tree and simply existing, if it weren't for Kairi _._

She loved Kairi, she did. She also loved to hate Kairi’s suggestions (and usually end up agreeing with her anyway)— _no, I'm not wearing this to class tomorrow; no, you probably shouldn’t fall in love with one of your best friends;_ and today's _no, I swear, if you try to set me up with one of Sora’s weird friends again—_

This time, however, she felt fully justified in her opposition. 

> _"_ I barely know the kid's name," she had argued, wondering if she could sprint toward the library doors faster than Kairi could catch her. "You can't just know two people meant to be, that sounds idiotic."
> 
> "Between the brothers, Sora might have the heart," Kairi pleaded, "but Roxas has the soul." She shrugged. "And the body, but you didn't hear that from me."
> 
> Naminé pressed her lips into a thin line, unimpressed.
> 
> "Please, Nam. I really think this could work out. Call it a hunch," she had said, voice a notch quieter.
> 
> "Your last hunch was that we weren't going to have a pop quiz in bio yesterday—“ Naminé deadpanned, but paused at Kairi's sincerity. She picked up her backpack, throwing it over her shoulder. Closing her eyes, she silently berated herself for caving in so quickly. " _Ugh_."
> 
> Kairi perked up slightly at Naminé’s apparent distress. "So, is that a yes, or...?"
> 
> Naminé leveled her gaze. "You're pushing your luck, Kairi."
> 
> "Right, of course," her friend nodded, spinning her phone in her hand. "But, like, hypothetically..."
> 
> Naminé’s bag was sliding off her shoulder, she had a ten-minute walk to class to make, and she had five minutes to do it.
> 
> "Fine," Naminé muttered. "But no more."
> 
> More nodding. "I promise. I have a good feeling about this one."
> 
> _That's what you said about the last one_ , she didn't add as she cut across the grass to class. _And I'm late to class again._

 

* * *

 

Waiting alone at the nearby cafe was what she had been reduced to. She checked the time. The man of the hour was two minutes late--which really was not criminal--but she was not exactly enthusiastic about her situation. But when footsteps approached and a soft-spoken "Hey, Naminé," interrupted her silent simmering, Naminé furrowed her brow.

It wasn't like she was checking him out, because that required some level of preemptive interest or a desire to join the dating market. She gave him... a cursory glance, she liked to call it, and he was an archetype with a capital 'A'. Blonde spikes typical of the generic college boy, a monochrome getup as per every decently-dressed young man, a longboard stashed under the arm characteristic of a coastal resident, and yet...

"Do I...?" She hesitated, trying to find the right words. Her fingers idly played with the condensation on her cup. "Do I know you?" she finished, dissatisfied but coming short of the phrase she wanted.

Roxas blinked slowly. Naminé wanted to describe it as warily, but perhaps that was her, projecting her own thoughts. "Naminé, we go to the same school. I think I have bio with you."

"No, nono, of course I know you, Roxas--I mean..." she bit her lip. Now there was a good question--what _did_ she mean? There was a sense of familiarity she could not put her finger on, a fleeting image of _something else_ or _something more_ , something nostalgic and heart-wrenching and connected all at once.

 _Maybe it just looks like he stepped off the cover of a Zumiez ad,_ she thought wryly. He sat across from her, leaning his board against the back of his seat. Not wanting to seem unhinged in the first thirty seconds of her interrupted afternoon, she said, "It's nothing, don't worry about it. How are you?"

She watched the boy fiddle with the collar of his tee--the black-and-white checkered pattern nagged at her. It felt like the minutes and hours were slipping by them, a negligible or infinite amount of time before either one of them spoke again.

"Yeah," he finally said. He scratched the back of his head. "I think know what you mean."

Awkwardness in one-on-one situations was her forte, really. "I--" she started.

Her sketchbook interrupted her by way of threatening to fall to the cement.

She reached to grab it; she missed.

Roxas didn't.

"Hey," he said quietly. He didn't open it. "What's this?"

Her entire being paused. There it was again, his hands holding her sketchbook, familiarity brushing by like a forgotten childhood dream. She didn't offer to grab it from him like she normally would have.

He said, "wait," his hand hovering over the book, riding the fence between holding it closed and flipping it open.

"Open it," she found herself saying, instead of the generic _what classes are you taking_? that she had planned on.

_Naminé, what are you doing?_

The boy paused. He stared at the book in his hands like a foreign object, then stared at Naminé as if she would disappear any second.

His words felt fragmented as they came: hesitancy became a mezzo-staccato measure. “Does something feel… off to you?”

She swallowed, unsure if she was grateful or terrified that he felt it too. With nothing else to respond with, she repeated, “Open it.”

He nodded, finally dragging his eyes back to the pages in his hands. The cover flipped and hung toward the floor and the two of them stared at the first page like an uncovered treasure.

He dragged his fingers slowly over the surface, tracing the edges of the four-pointed star that had been sketched years—probably more than a decade—ago.

It had been from a dream, she thought, or a concept like it. Since she could remember, she had dreams with that star written all over it: fantasy dreams with the star as a sigil of a medieval kingdom; abstract dreams of emptiness and the _idea_ of the shape and nothing else; nightmarish dreams of darkness and disappearing and the star lost in oblivion.

"Wait," he said again, and his hand went to his collar once again. Instead of toying with the material again, however, he reached inside and pulled out a chain. His pendant glinted in the sunlight for a second.

 _Of course it’s the same star_ , she wanted to say, as if she had known all along this would happen, as if she weren’t absolutely stunned and speechless at this turn of events.

She almost let herself reach out to touch it, the border between reality and fantasy blurring in her mind.

"How..?" she breathed. Her arm stopped halfway between them, falling to the table.

He shook his head, closing his eyes for a second. “Naminé… who are you? What..?”

She turned the page to a stone castle, the walls indistinct in their watercolor form. She told him about her dreams.

 

* * *

 

Once upon a time, the princess might have dreamt of a knight in shining armor on a beautiful steed, riding in to rescue her from her isolation.

Once upon a time, she might have imagined a life beyond being the "extra," the "spare."

Once upon a time, a girl had meaning.

This princess had learned that she was not mean to be saved. Years and years of solitude had become less of a peaceful getaway and more a prison. Never meant to be born, they said. A threat to the true blood of the throne, a stain on the image of such a highborn family. She had no beautiful crimson locks, had no neighboring kingdoms throwing their eldest sons at her feet.

No, as others said, she might as well be dead. 

At least, she argued (with herself, as she never had any company), she had a window, and she could watch the beautiful sunsets on the horizon. Sometimes the sunset did not feel as far away as she knew it was.

It would be less tragic, perhaps, if she couldn’t see the wall of thorns that grew around the castle or the darkening clouds that seemed to loom closer by the day. But the worst was the fair-haired knight that came by during what she imagined was mid-summer. He would slow as he passed her window, but distance took away the detail from the kingdom crest he wore and the features of his face. Some days, she imagined he could see her through the curtains and that someone out there knew she was alive.

_Was she?_

Eventually, the knight stopped riding by, and she was left to wonder if she had imagined him, too.

 

* * *

 

She had never shared these with anyone before. She didn't know why he should be any different.

"I don't get it,” Roxas interjected. He tore his eyes from the faint silhouette of a tower on the page. "How could..."

Her jaw clenched, fingers curling around the cover of the sketchbook.

"...it feel so familiar?"

_What?_

He turned through the pages, acknowledging her various sketches but gave no commentary. These were less special to her, practice and experiments. He stopped on the last one.

 

* * *

 

Pages of color on a backdrop of white; false memories strewn haphazardly across the backdrop of a world that never was; lies against the landscape of a tragedy.

She was never meant to exist.

But when she saw the blonde boy--not in his usual hooded black ensemble, but rather, a checkered jacket, more familiar to another era, she imagined her heart going out to him.

Neither of them were meant to exist.

She found herself on a solid stone path, smiling up at the bright sun. It was a beautiful day, full of potential and beginnings and endings and everything in-between.

"I wanted to meet you," she said. “at least once."

“Me?” His friends were frozen in time and the breeze had given away to a total stillness. The boy reached out a hand desperately--confused, helpless, out of place--he took a step forward.

And the dream changed, and it was a clock tower and dark coats and blue ice cream and three pairs of black boots (or was it two? She couldn't tell, sometimes).

Of course, she wasn’t with them. Three—two?—was the perfect number, anyway. It was always trios in this world, and every other world out there. No one had room for another.

She felt irrevocably sad or disappointed, she thought. They told her she shouldn't feel anything at all, but--the concept amused her, or something similar--who would know better than herself?

The clock tower chimed.

Worlds filled with darkness, a castle of white and an eternal shore for the lost: all the pieces lie where they fell.

_Do they still?_

 

* * *

 

To this one, he said nothing. He simply closed the sketchbook and stared at Naminé for a long, long time.

The clock tower chimed in the background, jarring Naminé back to a mindset of problem sets to finish and a lecture video to watch. She had never had a rug pulled out from under her feet before, but she imagined this was what it felt like. She had stopped describing the origin of her drawings, but the endless falling sensation hadn’t stopped.

“Who are you, Roxas?” she asked. The ice in her drink had long since melted, but she was beyond caring. Something—perhaps it didn’t have a name, but certainly a _thing_ , was changing, and Naminé felt like she was in the center of it.

He gave a breath of a laugh, running his hands through his hair again. “I was just about to ask you the same question.”

“They’re just… dreams,” she offered, zero conviction in her voice.

“And it’s just a total coincidence that I’ve had them too,” he finished, sarcasm dripping.

She smiled uncertainly. “I think we have a lot to talk about.”

Roxas made a show of checking the time—not on his phone or the clocktower behind them, but on a pocket watch, of all things—and shrugged. “We have a lot of time to talk.” He held up a hand as she opened her mouth. “But first, let’s get some ice cream.”

 

Maybe this time around, everyone could get a happy ending.

**Author's Note:**

> Check out the rest of the Worlds Connected entries on their [blog](http://kh-worldsconnected.tumblr.com/) or the fics on [AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/khwc_2k16)!
> 
> Shoutout to my artist partner for this project, [tewateroniakwa](http://tewateroniakwa.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Title from Jarryd James's [1000x](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3FV7pnTNeo).


End file.
